Episode 112: Death And Michelle Jenkins by Christopher Munroe

outtakes
Michelle’s mother and father aren’t quite sure about their daughter’s most recent choice in her love life. Sure, the kid with the Mohawk and the sternum piercing was not what they’d hoped for, but now she’s going out with The Grim Reaper?

Afterward, Big and Rish talk a bit about death. Their conversation becomes totally predictable in the end. Heck, I’ll bet they end with thanking people and then signing off.

Special thanks to Sonny C. for producing today’s story and to Juliet Bowler, R.E. Chambliss, and the Narrator for lending their voices to the episode.

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This entry was posted on September 24, 2011 at 2:58 am and is filed under Christopher Munroe, Comedy, Fantasy, Horror, Short Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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9 Responses to “Episode 112: Death And Michelle Jenkins by Christopher Munroe”

This story was a short, mean, clever little piece. I particularly enjoyed the quirks and incongruities that gradually coalesced into a story that wasn’t exactly what it seemed like it was going to be. I enjoyed it a great deal. I love how the Dunesteef so often manages to take very tame stories and add just enough in the way of music and sound effects – not to mention brilliant acting – and bring them to life.

Not to offend, but I’m pretty sure you guys are still missing the point with your recurring meme of “what’s the point of critiquing a finished story that isn’t going to be re-done?”. I think generally people critique fiction podcasts and magazines in order to get their preferences regarding what stories they enjoy and which they don’t across, so that more stories like those they enjoyed and less like those they did not get selected in the future.

By getting feedback and taking notice of the majority or recurring comments you can get a better feel of your audience and can, if you wish, play to them.

From a technical standpoint, playing to a small listener base that already are devoted, with forum accounts and so forth, might not be a great expansion of listenership strategy; but traditionally speaking attempting to gauge the response of readers is normal thing. People aren’t just being snotty internet jerks who call things predictable when they go through a perhaps unnecessary critical analysis of what worked or didn’t work for them in a story – they’re letting you know what you should avoid in future story selections.

If you don’t wish to listen, that’s fine; but the process itself is a pretty normal universal of any sort of entertainment medium.

No, no, no, no, the people in question, proclaiming “I totally saw that coming,” “a little too reliant on the tired tropes of writing fiction in English,” and “oh, that was sooooooo pr***ctable” are the very defintion of snotty internet jerks. To announce that every story every week of a podcast you listen to is predictable is not constructive, it’s holier-than-thou boasting and unnecessary nitpicking.

I’m sorry if you and I can’t see eye to eye on that, but water is wet and ice is often cold.

See, this is the exact problem I was posting about. You were talking about the predictable people at the end of this show, and that spun off into a repeat last show’s grating “there’s no point in commenting on the stories we run” rant that originally came from you guys talking about how much you hate having your own work criticized – and you spun off that concept in that conversation to apply to the Dunesteef too.

And now, when called on how ridiculous it is, you change the subject to talk about something only you are talking about: the predictable people. I’m sorry people calling you predictable wouldn’t dance with you at the prom that you submitted your stories to, but that was clearly not what I was referring to in my post.

I guess that’s a way of seeing it, author. I think the problem is that there are too many trolls on the internet who get off by riling people up, or putting people down. There likely are many people who are reviewing stories to make their tastes known, but I think it mostly gets lost in the noise made by the others, until it’s impossible to differentiate the good ones from the bad.

It’s an interesting way of seeing it, that I’d never considered before. Unfortunately for me, it doesn’t really help. When I select stories for the show, I pick ones that I like, that interest me, and make me want to produce a show with them. If they didn’t do that for me, then I wouldn’t be able to muster the energy to go through the arduous process of creating the show. It’s such a large amount of work, and, since it’s not a job, the only reward we get out of it is the good feelings that come from being able to say, “I made that.”

While I hope that others like the stories that we have on the show, I can’t change what we pick based on what people have said that they like or dislike or thought was predictable, because then it would no longer be fun for me. It would only be fun for them. And I wouldn’t want to put in the work it would take to make the show.

It seems to me that trying to pick stories based on what people said they liked and disliked would be impossibly difficult to be good at. Like trying to hit a constantly darting house fly with a BB gun or something. Or maybe more like trying to hit a swarm of flies with a BB gun. If one person liked the story, surely another hated it, and vice versa. So how could we possibly improve our story selection that way?

Anyway, sorry if our conversation topics haven’t been to your liking of late. Hopefully, we’ll hit you with our next BB, and the rest of the swarm can wait till the episode after that.

I didn’t say it made sense, it’s just the outward reason, the charade, to justify discussion boards and comments and everything.

The truth is forums and comment sections show that people are listening/reading and they discuss it, which lures more listener/readers. But part of that whole dance is letting them critique and comment on episodes so that they’ll keep showing up and bothering to comment at all. It’s just an unspoken norm, so it is just so weird to see it violated. There wouldn’t be any way to comment at all if one wasn’t supposed to talk about the material they just ingested. If you guys really felt that way so strongly that you can’t keep up the charade, I’m baffled why you started forums and haven’t disabled commenting.